


Chaste Desires on Heavenly Beauty Bound

by akathecentimetre



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: AU madness, F/M, Gen, Platonic Romance, Slow Burn, The Twelve Days of ObiDala, and a hint of OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:45:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 13,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5532998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Celebrating the end of the year: The Twelve Days of ObiDala! (Yes, really.) A collection of oneshots which will include platonic and romantic relationships, as well as a few AUs.</p><p>1 - Sometimes even Padmé Amidala just needs to be taken care of. Modern!AU, Christmas fluff.<br/>2 - Trapped on an ice planet, Padmé learns of a previously-unknown Jedi trick. It certainly helps with keeping warm.<br/>3 - Obi-Wan finds himself surprised at his own feelings when he has to instruct Anakin about attachment.<br/>4 - Handmaidens gossip. Sometimes, their former Queen joins in.<br/>5 - She marries into England when she is twenty-four. Arthurian/British mythos AU.<br/>6 - Obi-Wan regrets watching Padmé and Anakin grow apart.<br/>7 - Padmé knows just what to do for everyone - except herself.<br/>8 - AU of Mustafar. Padmé flees, and wonders what to do with the injured Jedi she has saved.<br/>9 - Post-Mustafar AU, take 2 (part 1 of 2). As the Right Hand's Wife, Padmé can do everything and nothing.<br/>10 - Post-Mustafar AU (part 2 of 2). Fighting a new invasion of Naboo, Padmé is grateful for Obi-Wan's presence.<br/>11. A short 'Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries' AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

*

_[Modern AU]_

*

Padmé only gets two hours of sleep on Christmas Eve. She's at her legislative offices until ten p.m. signing all the New Year's cards her constituents will receive (which she's already feeling guilty about, because really, who needs to be out in the cold delivering post in the last week of December); getting home always takes at least an hour even if she bent the rules of space and time on the highway, and by the time she's tiptoed into the twins' room to kiss their sleeping brows, cleaned the kitchen, finished the last of her gift-wrapping (she needs bows, where are the bows and the ribbon, and of _course_ they're part of Leia's ever-growing little collection of fiery-colored baubles and treats, which means a most undignified and silent wriggle under her low cot for her mother to get at them – her daughter is apparently part Loth-cat, and she's really not sure how that happened) and made sure she hasn't forgotten anything that's meant to be on the table for Christmas breakfast it is four in the morning, and Anakin hasn't woken up through any of it.  

She's just tired enough, thankfully, not to care, and to think that it's still worth it that when she slips in beside him he half-wakes and smiles sleepily and wedges her into him in exactly the position she needs to be in in order to sleep at all. (A week later, she'll remember that yes of course, it is worth it, and leave the puzzling over the various levels of her indignation and resentment to a time even later than that – until she forgets about it altogether. Until next time.) 

The twins are up at six, because they're both four and they've been looking forward to this particular incipient orgy of fun for weeks. Anakin is awake in an instant when they wriggle their way into their parents' bed and start jumping, trampling and hollering; Luke shoves his face into Padmé's for a kiss, grins when he gets it, and then powers away again, buzzing and banking like an X-wing on his way down the stairs with Leia in hot pursuit.  

It goes about as you might expect from there, really, and Padmé loves it, but for the first time in quite a _long_ time she finds it hard – so very, very hard, and wearying – to not simply turn over in her quilts and simply relish the silence. It's hard, this time, when she's been on the go for six months at a stretch without a vacation – or at least, she's the only one in the house who didn't take one – not to want to sit at the kitchen island and watch the patterned paper fly and shred from a distance, instead of what ends up happening, which is to be in the middle of it and cooing and laughing and wiping icing off of Anakin's oblivious face before he kisses her, and thinking that she only has half an hour left before she needs to start cooking, again, and –  

It disturbs her, deeply and suddenly, when she realizes she's been looking forward to this morning as something that needs to be _endured_.  

She's standing at the edge of the living room with her coffee mug (new, sporting the logo of the local competitive Dejarik league) in one hand and the other keeping her upright on the back of the sofa – which is now also the scene of Leia's enthusiastic re-enactment of the First Battle of Geonosis, decapitation of bounty hunters and all – when the door to the kitchen opens behind her, and when she gets over the brief moment of panic and remembers who it is, exactly, who is the only person outside of the family to own a key, it is as if every iota of necessary strength deserts her in an instant out of relief. 

“Gracious me,” Obi-Wan says, muffled around his surprise: he has both his arms full of brown paper bags, and the key, it's work done, is dangling haphazardly from the corner of his mouth on its little scrap of ribbon (Leia's choice, again). “Am I late?” 

“In a manner of speaking,” Padmé smiles. Obi-Wan's fine eyebrows rise a little, but he's a bit busy, then, with the avalanche of Skywalkers rushing towards him, and it takes a few minutes for him to wade through the detritus and the fresh round of happy screaming towards where she has huddled into the sofa, and crouch down to her. 

“How long do you need?” He's always known just how to speak to her, at a volume only she seems to be able to pick up.  

“Four hours?” 

“Done. Off with you.” 

The last she sees of them, her children are riding Anakin around the kitchen and he, on all fours, is doing a shockingly good impression of a bantha. After that, there is nothing, and it is glorious. 

By the time Padmé wakes up it is late enough in the afternoon that the winter sun is starting to set, and the shafts of light fading their way across her and Anakin's bedroom are pale and weak. She stretches, with the whole bed in which to curl and sprawl; she looks at the clock, and wonders if she should go back to sleep again.  

She comes downstairs with her hair still wet from the shower, into a little corner of bliss. Logs have been laid in the fireplace, and are merrily ablaze; the presents (those that aren't already broken) are in little piles to make clear their ownership, and the necklace Anakin has bought for her (it is beautiful, and suits her so well, and she knows how well he knows it, too) is spread carefully out on the coffee table, its links and beads delicately untangled. There is something cooking, too: she can smell garlic, and something roasting, and hear the distant tick of an egg timer.  

Obi-Wan is on the much-maligned sofa, alone, looking impossibly comfortable in one of his trademark cowl sweaters and a thick tartan scarf, and when she settles next to him and swings her legs up underneath her Padmé can smell what she always can when he's around, the scent of tea that has been left to steep for just a few seconds too long for anyone uninitiated into the art of making a good brew.  

“Where are they?” 

“Bail picked up Luke and Leia half an hour ago – there's a holiday market that's been set up behind the high school. I think I managed to persuade him not to buy them more than a pound of cotton candy each.” 

“And Anakin?” 

If she didn't know him better, she would swear Obi-Wan is feeling smug. “Cleaning the bathroom upstairs. With a toothbrush.” 

“You public school boys,” she sniggers, and lifts one of his arms so she can nest beneath it. “You're cruel.” 

“Nonsense. I simply have a lot of very useful experience of dealing with recalcitrant children.” He peers at his watch briefly, and crosses his legs with a murmur of contentment. “He should be finishing to my satisfaction soon. About the same time that dinner is ready to come out of the oven.” 

“You're a marvel,” Padmé sighs, and lets her eyes slide half-closed again before she speaks, this time more hesitantly. “Is Anakin – ” 

“He's well aware. And just as penitent as you would like, if I'm not mistaken.” 

Every time, Padmé thinks, and, miraculously, every bone and muscle of her is still totally relaxed. Every time, he knows just what to do. They'd made him stop bringing them holiday gifts years ago, but somehow he never stops giving. It's almost frightening, how well he knows the both of them, and how slow they are to remember it. 

“Babe?” Anakin's voice is wonderfully quiet as he creeps in, tall but stooped, from the stairs, ever-so hesitant, and beneath her exhaustion the brief thrill of victory at his self-awareness, and his new awareness of _her_ , makes Padmé feel very well taken care of indeed. 

“I should go,” Obi-Wan says, reserved but warm. “I'm expected at the Temple.” 

“Man, you've got to get away from them one of these years,” Anakin says over Padmé's head, halfway to giggling. “Not that I don't miss them too, but – ” 

“There's only so much time I can take away from chaperoning a bunch of retired college dons to come chaperone _you_ , Anakin,” Obi-Wan laughs. 

Padmé opens her eyes fully – puts her hand on Obi-Wan's retreating cheek. “Stay,” she murmurs, and means it. 

Obi-Wan looks at her, calmly; he looks at Anakin, and so does Padmé, and she can tell from the fond, gleaming look in his eyes that her husband is thinking of the same things she is – of school days and after when they were all too close far too often, and yet never close enough. 

“Hm,” Obi-Wan says, around the edges of a smile. “Ask me again, sometime.” 

He leans in, presses the briefest of kisses to Padmé's temple before he stands. Anakin's hug is grasping and long-fingered, creaking Obi-Wan's ribs so he huffs in distant exasperation over Anakin's shoulder, and when he forges out again into the half-snowed in pathway outside the kitchen door he lets in the cold and the happy shrieks of returning toddlers, frantic exhaustion strident in their calls. 

“Nuh-uh,” Anakin says, grinning, as Padmé starts to get up. “Stay. I've got this.” 

“You do?” 

“I sure do.” 

When Padmé next wakes up it is full night, and the only light is coming from the slowly-blinking strands on the tree, and Anakin is her pillow; Luke and Leia are her blankets, and all is right with the world. 

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spenser's _Amoretti_ , Sonnet 8:
> 
> MOre then most faire, full of the liuing fire,  
> Kindled aboue vnto the maker neere:  
> no eies buy ioyes, in which al powers conspire,  
> that to the world naught else be counted deare.  
> Thrugh your bright beams doth not ye blinded guest,  
> shoot out his darts to base affections wound:  
> but Angels come to lead fraile mindes to rest  
> in chast desires on heauenly beauty bound.  
> You frame my thoughts and fashion me within,  
> you stop my toung, and teach my hart to speake,  
> you calme the storme that passion did begin,  
> stro[n]g thrugh your cause, but by your vertue weak.  
> Dark is the world, where your light shined neuer;  
> well is he borne, that may behold you euer.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Totally made up a faction of Geonosians who are pro-Republic, and then set this on the ice planet in their system. Shrug!)

*

_[Canon Era]_

*

Padmé has been on Abyssissa for two days when the blizzard hits. The first attack comes less than two hours later, and in truth, she has been waiting for it, and Master Kenobi, who has spent the entirety of the negotiations with the Geonosian Republican sympathizers in a state of visible tension and anticipation, suddenly looks as relaxed as though he's in a garden on the Temple, effortlessly establishing command. 

"Safe harbor for the Senator," he says to the scattering, frantic delegates, not asking a question so much as demanding satisfaction: their chorus of replying frantic clicks and whirrs tell her, as she stands and shrugs her cloak over her shoulders, that they had never had the resources to think of such a failsafe. Their buglike faces are wrinkled and shivering as the claps and shudders of mortar shells and laser cannons thuds towards them from outside the ice caves, bearing all the marks of age and intelligence and unbearable worry for a species gone astray. 

"Then we must go further into the complex," Obi-Wan interrupts, overriding their anxiety; he turns to Padmé, puts a hand under her elbow, and smiles. "After you, Senator. R2 will determine our path." 

"Stop it," she murmurs, with a smile of her own, and at his enquiring look she finds herself hard put not to laugh (though she knows it is inappropriate, and that her experience of surviving much worse than this does not make her situation any less dangerous). "You're enjoying yourself." 

"Well," the Jedi says, just as quietly, and leans in towards her briefly as the Geonosian rebels start to cluster around them. "Even I have to admit that their speeches were getting a _bit_ dreary." 

Padmé had not packed sensible shoes, her staff and handmaidens thinking that awe, rather than practical justice, was to be the bargaining chip of the week; her feet are instantly cold as the shambolic group of them starts to trek into the warrens of caverns and tunnels deep under Abyssissa, following the cheerful chirps and rude clicks of R2 as he trundles along in the lead. Not for the first time, as she picks herself up from some slip or tumble and rearranges her heavy, quickly-sodden hems, Padmé finds herself wondering at the absurdity that has become her career.  

If she is to die in this war, after all, she would prefer it to be above ground. And preferably somewhere warm. She has never looked her best when tinged blue.  

It is close to seven hours later, with the Geonosian's wings beating slowly and starting to droop, that Padmé realizes both that the distant bombardment has faded from her hearing, and that there is fresh - and freezing - air on her face, rushing towards her from a brightening patch of light at the end of their particular tunnel. 

"We should call a halt," Obi-Wan says behind her; he has been their vigilant vanguard throughout the trek, his lightsaber hilt in his hand and frequently ducking into side-passages to make sure they have not been followed; he does not look tired in the least. "We have reached the other side, but even if they are not watching the entrance none of us can venture out in this storm. By morning we should have an armed response to our distress call." 

The sense of it makes its way, eventually, through to Padme's mind; she knows she is feeling slow and subdued, her limbs each retreating into the folds of her dress as though she is shutting down into some sort of hibernation. Kenobi's announcement sets the Geonosians, frantic about the possibility of their being discovered, all a-titter again, and she does not have the energy to take up her expected role of placating them. It is R2, in the end, who creakily shuffles her into a crevasse in the cave wall, one where she feels hemmed in by the potential of death and she puts her gloved hands out gratefully to press against the warm and buzzing panels of R2's outer shell, his circuits humming with artificial life. 

The Geonosian rebels are worried for her - she thinks. She recognizes the garbled sentences she has worked so hard to translate into Basic in her mind, the formal phrases made informal by circumstance and the approaching flutter of wings as they start to press forward.  

They meet a wall, one whose presence is as physical as it is invisible to the eye. When Padmé looks up, it is only Obi-Wan standing there, but she has long learned that a Jedi does not occupy only the space their body represents. 

"Stand down," he says, and his voice is as gentle as the ice is unyielding. "The Senator is under my care." 

They do, with a distant clatter of clucking and sighing, and soon find their way to their own frozen perches of snow in the pitted ceiling, curling up like bats. Padmé briefly loses track of time; when she opens her eyes once more her face is full of thick brown cloth, and sensation is returning, ever so slowly, to her core as Obi-Wan tucks his cloak tightly in around her. 

"You should have said something." 

"I rather thought you should have noticed," she says, too tired to make sure he knows she is teasing. His sideways smile in return tells her everything she had suspected - that he _had_ in fact noticed, and known he was incapable of stopping her (for her own sake or for the sake of them all, with their safety paramount) even if she had wanted to be asked. 

He puts the backs of his fingers on her brow; frowns, briefly, at the automatic reaction she has of wanting to press upwards into his touch, because Gods, it's damn well _unfair_  that he should be warm now of all times. "I can shelter you with the Force, if you are willing." 

"Willing?" 

"It requires a certain surrendering of control." 

"Funny," she murmurs, feeling very sleepy indeed. "Anakin has never mentioned this particular trick." 

"Indeed? How odd," Obi-Wan says, and she can tell he is laughing, if vaguely appalled, at his apprentice's implied lack of reserve as he settles in beside her in the crevasse. "I am almost disappointed." 

It is quite a remarkable experience, in the end. Padmé does not _experience_  warmth so much as she _becomes_  it - she feels as though she is made of sunlight, as though in her sleep she has transmuted into earth soaked with summer rain and trees taking in their nourishment.  

She has visions of torrid lava and deserts that are indistinct and distant, and wonders if the dreams Obi-Wan is sharing are of the past, or the future. His hands, on either side of hers, seem to burn without ever causing her pain. 

She wakes slowly, and the wind on her face has gone, and she is alone. Snug, almost, even in her prison of ice, and she has no real desire to move and release the warmth she knows she has trapped in all around her. 

But move she must, and move she does as R2 groggily turns back on beside her, into the refracted sunlight that has come bouncing down the tunnel; Obi-Wan is standing upright in the distance exit, framed by crystalline shards, and seems to be directing an unseen ship in to land.  

"Senator," he calls, as she shuffles closer in her borrowed protection, looking fondly at the dabs of ice which have settled, seemingly unnoticed, in his beard and hair. "Your chariot awaits." 

"Oh," he adds, offhand, as she steps, blinking, into the sun - "and my apprentice, it seems." 

Absurdity, she thinks, as the nearby Republic transport, sending up swirls and spurts of snow, settles and starts to regurgitate its rescue staff, with a tall, powerful figure in the midst of them, shoving all others out of his way as he makes his way towards her. It seems destined to rule her life. 

But no less welcome, she thinks later, when she has slept properly and dreamlessly - no less welcome at all, for the comfort of certainty and acceptance that it brings, even from the most unexpected of quarters.

*


	3. Chapter 3

*

_[Canon Era]_

*

There have been several points in Obi-Wan's life when he has been confronted with the fact of his own attachments. They are disorienting moments, for the most part: ones which provoke worry and introspection and, only slowly, the acceptance and calm necessity of thought that reminds him that their mere _existence_  is not, in and of itself, any proof of a personal failing. They must be dealt with as they come, and cannot be planned for nor prevented, for in his case his various entanglements of feeling have ever been so natural and so simple that he can never determine their beginnings, and only reluctantly seeks their ends.  

In retrospect, his friendship with Senator Amidala is one whose origins are not at all mysterious. Even in his short career, he has been no stranger to the frantic press of trust and sympathy that dangerous circumstances encourage. Their rush to Naboo, the formality she put aside when she took up her rightful identity as queen, her coolness under fire - they had all impressed upon him the idea that she was an ally. 

There was the hesitant touch of her hand, too, at the funeral; her questioning murmurs asking him if there was anything she could do, anything he needed. He had thought about it long and hard, before summoning up his first smile since Qui-Gon's murder - and saying no. He was to think about her kindness again, and appreciate it, for years to come. 

By the time he sees her again, with six foot of gangly, nervous Padawan by his side, his memories of her have solidified into a type which he does not expect to find difficult to comprehend. He is impressed by how she has grown, as they all must; he is impressed by her solitude, by the maturation of her drive to command and the causes to which she chooses to bend her resources.  

It is only when Anakin speaks to him, hesitantly, in the wake of their adventure with the bounty hunter, that he is startled into his old self-awareness. 

"Master," Anakin says, and pauses again. "What would the Order make of my being friends with someone outside the Order?" 

He suspects his apprentice is choosing his words very carefully, but that does not mean his question does not deserve to be answered as it was asked. "Friendship is key to our interactions with everyone, Padawan, be they Jedi or civilian. Determining whether you can trust and work with any being is a skill we use every day." 

"But - is it not a form of attachment? Even the act of trust, of - appreciation?" 

That surprises Obi-Wan; makes him wonder, not for the first time, how on earth it is he is apparently so poor a communicator of ideas and instruction (despite the evidence of his career and the praise of his colleagues) in this one, all-important case.  

There is a clear and noticeable difference, he says eventually, between the act of appreciation and the notion of ownership which so often comes skittering in its wake, unbidden. "It is the difference between loving them for yourself, or for their own sake," he says, and Anakin's face twitches as though the mere idea of that act of distancing causes him pain. 

"Take my friendship with the Senator, for example," he says, quieter, and watches tension roil in Anakin's shoulders. "I admire her in every aspect. She _is_  admirable, in fact, in all of her activities, in every one of her idealisms. I am - proud of her, though my pride might mean nothing to her. I know what I can expect from her, in most cases, and I delight in her achievements. I am not, however, at all invested in directing her life, nor securing her affections." 

My opinion of her does not allow me the privilege - if it can even be termed as such - of demanding anything of her, he says, and peters off into silence, and is not sure whether he has made any dent in Anakin's deeply-roiling emotions. The boy sits still, and glowers, and is puzzled. His brow beetles in tight, and Obi-Wan cannot tell whether he is pleased by the options he has been offered. 

"What if that's not enough?" he asks, finally, and Obi-Wan's breath catches before he determinedly lets it out in a sigh. 

"I'm afraid it must be, for us, Padawan." 

"Because of who we are?" 

"Because of what we aspire to be," Obi-Wan says, and thinks of his own, distant astonishment at his own words, and of the pretty bend of Padmé's neck. "Friends to all, and masters of none." 

He could have stood to emphasize that last point, he will find himself remembering, much later, when it becomes abundantly clear that Anakin has stepped over all the boundaries he was warned against. It is so easy, after all, to lose oneself in the notion that the Jedi are destined, indeed required, to aspire towards mastery of whatever task, emotion, skill, or possession they are presented with. 

For Padmé's sake, he can only hope Anakin remembers this, too. 

*


	4. Chapter 4

*

_[Canon Era]_

*

Padmé does not see her former handmaidens as often as she would like, during the War. The combination of necessary circumstance and longing leaves her shocked, sometimes, into silence - those lonely moments, most often, when she is readying herself for sleep on Coruscant with only the help of a droid, knowing that they are elsewhere. Knowing that they are protecting Jamilia, and that for their own sakes and for hers, they _should not_ be thinking of her. She had grown up enough among them, and inherited their deep sense of duty - so deep it was ingrained into their bones - to dishonor them by resenting their absence, but it hurts. After so many years of constant companionship, she finds herself clinging ever more closely to Anakin simply to have someone to talk to. 

She treasures her brief moments on Naboo, now, for so many reasons - the beauty, the unquestioning peace, the hum of good works - and their presence is no exception. As Senator, she is met by Rabé on the landing pad when her ship settles down; as a former queen, she is sometimes assigned the little gaggle of Eirtaé, Rabé, and Saché to protect her, with a smiling Captain Typho always circling in and out of all of their lives.  

Padmé can see it in their eyes, sometimes, as she sees it in her sleep - that brief, haunted emptiness of their eyes when they come face to face with her and see Cordé, rather than Amidala. She startles her own self, sometimes, when she looks into a mirror during her frequent toilettes and sees the features of someone martyred. 

She misses, and cherishes more than ever, the ritualistic acts of retiring for the evening with them. The folds of cloth over arms as discarded garments are gathered up, the stretch of arms as they divest her of her burdens, the smells of incense and carefully prepared powders and wines - things she once thought overly luxurious and time-consuming are now precious to her. The time, the care, and the dedication she is shown feel like indulgences of the most necessary sort, taking her away from everything that would hound her into madness (troop movements, supply lines, diplomatic injustices - they await her in the morning, but for now, they can be - if not forgotten - at least repressed).  

They are all so young, she remembers, surprised by it, one evening when it is late and she was supposed to be in bed an hour ago, and instead they are on the balcony of her lavish palace suite in the summer moonlight, little collapsed piles of crumpled dresses and cushions, giggles muffled by the heavy air. It frightens her, sometimes, the disconnection between their private and their public selves. 

"Oh, the HoloNet doesn't care," Sabé is saying carelessly, the dark circles under her eyes stark after her makeup has been removed. "They'd much rather gossip about which Jedi must be sleeping with which General or Senator to have caused this or that battle, rather than the politics." 

"So would we," Rabé mumbles into her glass, and somehow that is the funniest thing of all: that they, that _she_ , Padmé Naberrie Amidala of Naboo would far prefer the war to come down to such inconsequential things. Money, weapons, ethnic hatred - she would erase them all for the chance to say: he is sleeping with her, and she with them, and she knows what it feels like. Let us all go home. 

"Knight Skywalker is much favored by the Coruscanti ladies," Eirtaé announces grandly, for all the world like she is one of the HoloNet's most popular rumormongers and gets paid for it. Padmé's breath catches, so fierce is the possessive pride she feels at her secret. "Master Windu is adored, but not considered an achievable catch." 

"Good Gods," Padmé says, unable to contain her mirth any longer at the thought of the Korun master being the subject of anyone's fancy (or fantasy). "Please don't tell me Master Yoda has - " 

"Oh, there are _clubs_ ," says Dormé, gleeful. After that, they are unable to speak for some time. 

"Master Obi-Wan, now," Sabé says eventually, with a fondness Padmé finds intriguing. "He will forever be above such things. More's the pity." 

Padmé is astonished to hear, once the subject is breached, that Kenobi has maintained contact with all of her ladies from those desperate, sunlit days of the Naboo invasion. Once he had been disabused of the trickery they had employed on their trip to Tatooine, he took the time to memorize all the slight differences between their faces. He has written to them, collectively and individually, asking how they did. How they were surviving, how they coped with their nightmares; thanked them, explicitly or, later, through kind words they didn't realize were warranted, for the calm they had kept in the palace during some of the darkest days of his life. How they had fed Anakin, the ravenous little slave, and talked to him, when his new young master could not think of what to say.  

She wonders if he is in love with any of them, or any of them with him, and finds herself curiously uncomfortable with the thought. Not because it would be wrong (she can hardly preach on that score), or that she would wish them anything but happiness - but because it puts cracks, deep ones and damaging, into the idea she has of any or all of them. 

"Is he so unattached, then?" she asks, casually, and is almost relieved at the chorus of nods she receives.  

"They try, the matrons of Coruscant - if their little confessionals are anything to go on." 

"For their daughters. And for their sons." 

"The more miserable toe-rags imply the most inappropriate things about the nature of his command." 

"Well, that's hardly new. That wretched article about Master Fisto - " 

"Totally unfounded, of course - " 

Padmé listens, and wonders, and finds that, by the end of the night, when they are all asleep in her chambers and the air has finally grown cool, that though her world might have tilted all of her previous assumptions have actually been confirmed. She is in love with a Jedi, and his master is one of the very best of beings. 

Perhaps the only thing that has changed, she thinks, as she slips into slumber, is that she suspects that she may be in love with the Jedi as an entity, and not just with what Anakin is. Perhaps what he represents - what they all do - is what has drawn her in, what keeps her circling, what keeps her feeling like she is not totally alone. 

She falls asleep quickly, and in the morning, thinks no more about it.

*


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter: a tilt at an Arthurian/English mythos AU. (Yeah, I have no idea.)

*

_[Arthurian/British Mythos AU]_

*

And indeed He seems to me 

Scarce other than my king's ideal knight, 

'Who reverenced his conscience as his king; 

Whose glory was, redressing human wrong; 

Who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it; 

Who loved one only and who clave to her - ' 

Her - over all whose realms to their last idle, 

Commingled with the gloom of imminent war, 

The shadow of His loss drew like an eclipse, 

Darkening the world. 

\- Alfred Lord Tennyson, _Idylls of the King -_  

*

Queen Amidala is married into England when she is twenty-four years old.  

She travels with her ladies, clad all in scarlet, and dazzles wherever she goes. She is known for her beauty, for her modesty; the realm she is going to is dark and wild, renowned for being infested with spirits and miracles. There is a new king, they say, who shines brighter than the sun: he has cast down war leaders and raised others up for their loyalty, he has tamed the forests themselves and dispelled the darkness. 

They say he is Arthur reborn, and when Padmé finally meets Anakin, with the mud of the road on her hem and surrounded by the heavy scent of hastily-applied perfumes, she is stunned into believing it. His great round table is gilt with gold, as is his crown, as are his eyes. He loves quickly and passionately, and she, canny provincial politician she has always been, relishes the relief of giving all she can of herself. 

As she has her women he has his knights, and they are resplendent. The Irish poets and Welsh bards flock to sing of them; his Lancelot is a slight man whose heraldry catches every sort of light in royal blues and muted, shining silvers. They say Kenobi was born of the ocean, appearing ravenous and fully-formed in handmade armor from the eastern fens. They say he was trained by the Green Knight himself, a mountain of a mythical man whose long hair was full of nettles and whose beard grew its own wildflowers. They say he trained a dragon, once, and rode it as easily as he would any steed. 

She doesn't quite believe in their implied prowess, despite all the epics and stories and frankly-told myths - not until she sees them on the tilting ground, and is frightened by how they crash each other to a standstill, until their arms give out from the weight of their swords and they stand swaying into each other in the detritus of their brother knights' flags. What they are like in war, she cannot imagine. 

They go on crusade, and she is left alone for four years. 

When he returns, Anakin is changed. He has been left brittle, she thinks - bleached by the desert, made old overnight. He tells Obi-Wan that he wishes to complete Arthur's quest for eternal life, the sad failure of which lies in his sunken, ill-treated barrow at Glastonbury. They spend long hours talking of it, murmuring in front of fires far into each night. 

Padmé does not know where the man she had married has gone. What she does know is that he makes a wreckage of the careful alliances she had maintained between kingdoms and nobles while he was away. She knows that finds solace in the fact that Kenobi patronizes musicians, while Anakin cultivates war leaders, surrounding himself with hard, silent men who do not deign to speak to her. Kenobi tells her of Jerusalem, glimpsed shimmering at a distance as though it, too, were a mirage; he makes sure the traveling merchants she had so loved continue to visit her, bringing her spices and silks and well-traveled wines. 

She can see Anakin's jealousy, as though his anger has been made flesh. He sends Kenobi away, grandly proclaiming that no other man can be trusted to find the Grail. By the time he returns a year later, empty-handed and thin with heartsick at his failure, Padmé is with child, and the way he looks at her confirms that they have all had enough, the three of them, of maintaining any further charade. 

She dreams of her own death - that her life ends in fire, and that her body will be sent out to sea like a Viking princess, floating in a bed of flowers. 

Anakin's rage is terrible when his knights desert him, and the army he gathers to hunt them down seems to stretch over counties' worth of fields, campfires burning through nights and days. Their challenger, in the end, is a lone knight: Padmé watches from the battlements as Kenobi slowly approaches, throws down his gauntlet, and challenges, man to man, his former liegelord to prove his honor. 

The final appeal to decency is not enough - the bonds of fealty have been broken by the lesser vassal, says the outraged king, and it is his right to inflict punishment. The next morning, apparently for her own safety - so sayeth the king - Padmé discovers that the doors to her chambers have been locked and barred, trapping her inside.  

'Outlaw.' It is a shocking word, almost amusing in its implications, particularly when it is applied to those you least expect to bear it. Somewhere, Padmé suspects, Kenobi is laughing at having earned it - but not with any mirth. 

She falls ill during her confinement. She falls into a hazy sleep with a blur of colors before her eyes - reds, golds, the halo of her frantic husband's hair. Later, she thinks it is the echo of flames. The air smells of burning oil, of siege engines, of Greek fire, and when she next becomes aware of anything it is quiet, and cold, and she is hurtling along a damp, misty forest path with Kenobi's arm strong about her waist and his horse panting and foaming with exhaustion. 

Her children are born in the greenwood, and tended to by fairies, which she had never before thought were real. 

Years later, Kenobi will apologize to her, with a depth of feeling she does not quite understand, for having taken her away from everything she had deserved, and she will say - with a bow of oak in her fist, and bluebells in her hair, as their woodsmen scout ahead for their black-clad enemies - that she has been taken from things all her life, and that it is only now that she feels something has been gained back.

*


	6. Chapter 6

*

_[Canon Era]_

*

Purpose before love. Care taken, yet distance maintained. Affection, until support is self-sustaining. 

Every Jedi, Obi-Wan thinks, has re-written the Code in their heads by the time they are fifteen. If they were to write it down each time, he suspects the changes would follow noticeable patterns: from those that succeed, a visible growth of compassion, self-awareness, of wisdom; of sadness, yes, but not one which haunts or shames their older selves. 

He knows, from certain heady times in his life, what the counter-arguments are - what he had told himself in particular fits of pique, or had had told to his face (Satine, after all, had never been once to mince her words). 

'A love half-given is not love at all,' it is said. _It could be._ But no, that was an opinion only rarely shared, and still less often appreciated to the point where it could last. And when one outgrows selfishness, that deepest and most destructive and most difficult to eradicate of impulses -  

\- it's not hard, after all, he's found, to be happy with what one has. With what one _is,_ too, a concept that wraps up body, mind, soul, and action all in one.  

It's also not hard to see when one is struggling with the idea that selfishness is not only about oneself. It is a greedy, ravenous little thing: it grasps, it has barbed edges, it snares you and those you care most about in a net from which you cannot extricate anyone. It drags downwards. It is a weight you train yourself to carry, oblivious to how much your shoulders stoop. 

Obi-Wan sees it in Anakin's features every day, and worries it is already too far ingrained. Oh, there are moments - battlefield moments, usually, during the war, when he thinks his former apprentice has learned to toe that delicate line of involvement and selflessness which makes him, to the eyes of the galaxy, such a brilliant commander. He observes, quietly, every medbay visit, every muster, every strategy meeting that he can, and thinks he sees what he had looked forward to with a growing desperation during Anakin's teenage years - the capacity for greatness without seeking reward. 

Many times, he sees it. Other times, he thinks that the absurd tricks, the suicidal charges, the reckless brilliance is not properly measured against their cost. He thinks he sees a man who praises his men for their bravery for the sake of maintaining and enhancing his own reputation; though he knows well enough that this urge can be unconscious and habitual, he regrets its manifestations all the same. 

When a Jedi is selfish, in this day and age, beings die. That is really all there is to it. 

And so it frightens him, slowly (but far quicker if he allows himself the danger of truly contemplating its details), when he realizes just what it is Anakin and Padmé have done. 

He has known for far longer than they are aware, of course. A Jedi is adept at reading emotions; they know them like they know the backs of their own hands, every swirl and knot and slope of flesh and feeling. A Jedi has ears, and so he hears what Coruscant says about these meetings; the gossip of the Senate is, after all, at their doorstep and frequently seeking to find its way into the Temple itself. A Jedi has eyes, and so he sees their mutual looks, and the duck of heads, of polite, respectful friendship towards him when he is in their way. 

Most of all, a Jedi has the Force, and he knows what it feels like when they are in the same room with an accuracy that he knows his fellow Masters cannot, not having lived in close proximity to the bonfire that is Anakin for as long as he has. They sometimes feel, but they do not understand, how the whirlwind of pulsing light that is the young Knight sharpens and shudders when Senator Amidala is in his presence; how it darkens around its edges, begins to muddy and smolder and spontaneously combust.  

 _She_  is not sensitive to the Force, but she exists in its eddies nonetheless - in Anakin's waves. And it is easy to see how she is changed by them. How she is drawn in by it, how its absence torments her, how they believe they complete each other. 

In his quieter moments of concern, Obi-Wan is able to acknowledge that there is agency between them still: he respects her too much to think that she is unaware of what is happening to them both, unaware of Anakin's mysterious unhappinesses, of the danger they are both in when, greeting her on Coruscant late in the third year of the war, Obi-Wan feels his breath catch when he senses the life that is beginning to spark within her. 

As Anakin waxes, she wanes. The war makes her thin; when the evil descends upon them all, it is the heat of her hands as they clutch at his which reminds him, after his numbing rush back from Utapau, that he is still alive. 

For years, he realizes, he has been afraid of how freely she has given pieces of herself away.

Now, it seems, there is very little left of either of them.

*


	7. Chapter 7

*

_[Canon Era]_

*

Even in the midst of wartime, there are moments of joy. There have to be, Padmé often thinks during the first year of it , or they would all go mad, the whole seething, plotting, massacring lot of them - and the happiness she feels when Anakin, in particular, is with her is almost always vibrant enough to ensure that she does not allow herself to be too guilty (not enough to bring her down, at any rate) in its aftermath. She cannot afford the time, the luxury, or the feeling necessary for self-pity. 

Almost always - in that first year. 

In the second year, she can feel Anakin slipping away from her. It's not as if she hasn't been expecting it - being a war veteran of sorts herself since the age of fourteen, she knows what it is to wake up from nightmares. Being a senator means she is dragged across the galaxy by her conscience and by order. She can't pretend her struggles are the same as her husband's, but she hopes - she tries - to understand, and make sure that for once, someone (them, and those they love) will make it through. 

Padmé's realization that she is orbiting around certain touchstones is slow and, though initially terrifying, finally comforting. It feels good to know that in the midst of so much death, she can contact Naboo and Jamilia will answer, and that she still knows her former handmaidens well enough that she can see the small twitch of joy on their faces, even through a hologram, when she calls them by name. She feels that same impulse herself at the sight of Anakin, even if at a distance of parsecs and thousands of light-years; even if he is simply mentioned on a HoloNet report, there is something that makes him feel close.  

There are certain senators which make her laugh - it startles her, just the physical sensation of it, when she giggles at Orn Free Ta's antics, or when Duchess Satine, visiting to plead Mandalore's case for the umpteenth time, turns to her during her Senate session and rolls her eyes in such a way which says, very clearly, that they will be indulging _heavily_ in cocktails and an evening of jokes at the Chancellor's expense. 

She knows that she must treat her relationships with the Jedi with more care, but that does not stop her from making sure, whether unconsciously or on purpose, that she catches sight of the Temple at least once a day. The silhouette of it on the horizon calms her; it is immovable. Eternal. 

Master Kenobi produces the same immutable effect. Just like Anakin, she refuses to call him General: on Coruscant, in her presence, there is too much between them to so easily discard the identities by which she first came to know them. And they share the same anxieties, she feels - while Anakin retains a sense of ravenous youthfulness, while she can still see the desert in him, she knows that she and Obi-Wan share that similar weight of responsibility that is making them old before their time. She feels stretched, sometimes, by her long hours and the quiet of nights spent alone; he grows wrinkles and dark circles around his eyes, and sometimes she thinks there is a heartbreaking hollowness behind his smiles. 

Even Jedi must rest. When Anakin is with her, Padmé thinks she can give him that. When she sees Masters Yoda, Windu, Gallia, or Mundi, she knows what they need of her, too - a smile, unquestioned competence, quietude, the security of knowing they can speak their minds, air their greivances, and be _heard_. Only a few of them understand that she cannot promise solutions, but the trust they offer her is usually enough. Ensuring that those around her are taken of has become as necessary to her well-being as her anticipation of the war's end.  

Obi-Wan's rest is more difficult to determine than others. When both he and Anakin are with her, it is easy to speak about anything; when he is alone in her presence, they speak of the war until the last moment, until he takes a moment, usually as he is leaving and the nighttime city is studded with painfully bright lights, to look at her - really look at her - and she feels pierced through. 

"Are you all right?" he asks.  

Every time she sees him, he asks, and she never knows what to say. 

In the third year of the war Anakin stops speaking to her about it, and she cannot bring herself to point it out to him. She knows what his response will be: _I don't want to upset you. This doesn't belong in our life. I don't want my child to grow up in a galaxy at war_. 

Padmé needs her realities. She needs the acknowledgment, the sense that they all know what is happening, that this is wrong and that they are strong for surviving it. If they are to live, she would rather do it in the full knowledge of what it is they are achieving and what they are fighting for. 

A party, on Coruscant: a night of relaxation, of dealing under tables and over drinks, and her apartments become a second Senate. They are beyond the stage, now, of separating out into their little cliques - grasping for conversation, the Jedi who attend are keen-eyed and paranoid, the politicians timid and wheedling. Obi-Wan does not leave her side for the entire evening (Anakin is away, and she mustn't let herself think that he might be in battle at this very moment, or she will drop her glass), and when the droids are trundling their way through their cleaning his hand is firm beneath her elbow as she staggers. 

She has had too much too drink, she thinks, or perhaps she is just tired beyond measure. She has his hand within hers; she lifts it to her cheek, takes comfort at its warmth, at the fact that he can hold her up with such ease. 

"My dear..." He seems hesitant to touch her, though all she wants is for an arm about her shoulders, some sort of sensation that is neither professional nor intimate. And then he laughs, ever so slightly, and there it is, his other hand on her upper arm, and his cloak is around them both on the wind-chilled balcony. 

"I never even got around to saying it this time," he murmurs. 

They sit, and he leans forward, and asks her when she had last thought of herself, and she has no answer. And he knows, too, that he need not do anything more: he simply looks at her, and smiles his sad smile, and knows that now that the thought has been planted, she will not let go of it.  

"You used to kiss me hello," she says, when she has finally figured out how to let go of him and he is half-stepped into his speeder. "You've been forgetting." 

"So I have," he muses, looking genuinely surprised. He takes a moment to contemplate this, and then leans forward - the slight touch on her forehead feels like a benediction.  

 _Be well_ , she hears in the hum of the speeder. _Be well_  - it echoes in every message she receives from him, in every piece of news, in every moment she catches sight of that immense block in the middle of the Coruscant skyline; and every time she is reminded, it is like the care has been immediately taken. Her shoulders straighten. She has been missing this from Anakin, for a long time. 

On the rare occasions she lets herself think about it in those terms, it feels like her heart has been placed in a vise.

*


	8. Chapter 8

*

_[Canon Era AU]_

*

When she woke on the platform, she was alone - she thinks. 

She can't quite remember. It hasn't been very long, she is sure: Mustafar is still large and red and bleeding in the ports of her ship. She is losing time nonetheless - she closes her eyes and thinks she has only blinked, but things keep changing. Things keep frightening her, startling her, making fire dance before her eyes. 

She is in the sickbay. Sitting. Upright. C-3PO hovers by her side, nervous, metal plating shivering. She turns to him - says, _painkiller_ , and his clumsy jointed hands rummage in a drawer, press the hypo into her palms. She sucks in the spray of it and feels her head spin. 

He is lying near her, crumpled on his side on the narrow bed.  

She cannot stand how he breathes. The lava seems to have sunk into his lungs. It is a wonder he is still alive - the dreadful hiss and rasp of the air as it passes in and out of the oxygen mask has stolen away his voice. He sounds like a machine. 

 _Where is he?_ she had asked, and he had not been able to answer. He had simply crumpled at her feet, two lightsaber hilts clunking to the ground out of his burnt sleeve, and she had stood half-crouched on the edge of the platform for what felt like an hour, desperate, waiting for another Jedi to come stumbling out of the smoke. 

When he had emerged from the volcano, after all, his injuries had nearly kept her from recognizing him - even when she knew him so well, and so dearly. A blue lightsaber has seared into him, left patterns so careful they almost look planned.  

That's what told her, eventually, that it was not Anakin she was dragging towards the ramp.  

There are periods when Obi-Wan, however briefly, stops breathing at all. Padmé finds herself jolted into motion; clutching one arm across her belly, she hunches the other over him, waits to feel some murmur that convinces him he is still there. It is all she can do to hope that this motionlessness is deliberate - that there is something about the Force, weakened and in pain as it may be, which is doing its best to heal him, and to spare him from what he has done. 

What _they_ have done, she thinks, and wishes - as she feels her children kick and batter at her insides as they share her distress - that the Force would have the compassion to bring her the same peace. 

 _Don't go_ , she thinks. 

 _I need something of my past to make the future bearable._  

When next she is aware, the comms are chirping frantically from the cockpit with what sounds like Bail's voice, and there is a hand - burned, but there is life in the tendons still, and gentility, and an exhausted strength in it - holding hers. 

"Hello," she whispers, and coughs, and puts a hand to Obi-Wan's cheek so she can look him in the eyes. "Can you - " 

A minute shake of his head: no, he cannot speak, not yet. But she can do this - she can stand, she can bring him water, she can be aware of herself under his gaze. She can walk to the cockpit, and speak quietly and clearly to those who are coming to help, and she can make her fingers stop shaking for just long enough to operate the nav computer for as long as it takes to make sure they are flying somewhere safe, at least for now. These are the things she is capable of doing, now. 

They are a start.

*


	9. Chapter 9

*

_[Canon Era AU]_

_*_

It hadn't been difficult, in the end, to convince Vader to let them both live. 

When she had come to, struggling for breath, on the ash-covered platform her mind had already been working, grasping desperately at options her heart could not comprehend. (She was to recognize this, later, as shock, and she was glad of it. It had saved her life, and many more; at the time, however, it had felt as though a black hole had taken up residence in her chest and that she was disappearing into it, piece by piece.) 

She thought of what to do if she were to be left alone. She thought, with a trembling hand on her belly and doing her best to force air into her lungs so her children would stop their frantic, fearful kicking, of what she would do if she were to die, and leave them alone - and what she would do if she were to live, and they to die. (That one hurt.) It all depended, however, things that were entirely beyond her control, and this, it seems, is her final helplessness: after months and years of the galaxy and everything she once thought it could be slipping like sand through her fingers, it is all she can do to lie there, and wait, and see what will come over the hill towards her.

It comes, eventually - one staggering figure, dragging another by singed hair. Anakin has two lightsabers in his other fist, both sparking and useless, their power cells crushed to cinders. 

Her final moment of weakness, and then she vows that she will never allow herself to be used again - 

Padmé looks up, and she knows her eyes are pleading. Not accusing, or condemning - she knows she is looking at Anakin as though she wants something of him and nothing, and nobody, else in the universe can grant what she desires.

He'd always fancied himself a savior. And he does now, too, as his burning yellow eyes dim and he looks at her pregnancy, and drops his burden. Obi-Wan's head makes a sodden crack as it hits the ground.

She cries. She says:  _ please_.

When he lifts her up and carries her into the ship, leaving behind everything he was, she dares not look back - she doesn't even know if Obi-Wan is alive or dead as they lift off and the Mustafar facility starts to devour itself, its edges crumbling away into seething lava.

She does not allow herself, for the first three months, the luxury of thinking Vader might be redeemed. Her children are born, and she tells herself not to believe the flash in his eyes that might have been blue; she loves them so fiercely she thinks she might lose sight of herself, and what she must do. In her palace on Coruscant, the home of the Empire's Right Hand, she wanders, plays her part, and dreams not of salvation but of the hatred in the Emperor's eyes whenever he looks at her, knowing that he had not planned for her survival and fearing her power. He frightens her so much that she stops eating from time to time, petrified of poison in the rich feasts she is brought in the continuing effort to keep her pacified.

She sleeps alone. Sometimes, she wakes thinking Vader is watching her (he wheezes, now, having inhaled too much rotten black smoke, and refuses treatment for it; it makes something deep in her sternum ache to hear him). When they do touch, in their capacity as Lord Vader and His Wife, his gentleness is efficient, distant, cold. 

(He dresses the children in blacks and greys, surrounds them with crushed velvet as they gurgle, wide-eyed. She feels as though her entire world is fading into monochrome.)

Padmé thinks, every day - every hour - how very easy it would be, just to give in. She is so tired; the act of concealment alone drains every last iota of energy she has, leaves her pale, leaves her needing encouragement from Vader himself to mind her health. It would be so easy, to taste the food and wait for the poison to take effect; to unlock her door at night and leave it open. So easy, when she is allowed out for the first time and she takes the opportunity to observe a session of the eviscerated rump Senate, to take the oath of loyalty - to simply stand up and say to Bail Organa, who she sees bright-eyed and clutching at his briefing books: your rebellion will fail, and you are a traitor. Let us have peace.

_ Let us have peace _ , her dream-Emperor chuckles.

The twins are six months old when she first feels brave enough to surf the HoloNet - idle searches, checking to see whom among her former friends and enemies are still alive. The Imperial networks are slick and carefully-maintained, clamping down on dissent, putting out masses of propaganda. They are so monotonous, at first, that they nearly serve as a lullaby.

She learns to read backwards. It reminds her of the war, of spinning bad news sideways and good news upwards; of reading through intelligence reports and wondering which insignificant line among thousands will be the key to months of death. In her new circumstances, bad news for the Empire trickles out only slowly, but it does trickle out - the Emperor's wrath runs so deep, and his apprentice's mercilessness so renowned, that they cannot help but swear vengeance. They like the word 'treachery' and all its variations, and apply it liberally - and when Padmé looks for it, the Rebellion's war spreads out like a starmap before her.

The scale of it is breathtaking, and, for the first time, gives her hope that she can once again do the impossible.

When the twins are one year old, and they love nothing more than to clamber around her rooms, chattering - laughing! - and tugging with wonderment at her hair, she is no longer considered important enough to merit being told in person about the most important piece of news since the Empire's foundation. In retrospect, she remembers feeling calm that day, so very calm that it almost seemed supernatural; it was effortless, that calm, as though bestowed rather than fought for.

In the moment, the first inkling she has that a Jedi Master and Rebellion General has been brought to Coruscant as a captive of Tarkin's crowing fleet is when she opens her eyes, unbidden, in the middle of the night to find him standing over her. 

It is not difficult to remain silent; she needs no sign from him to be shocked into quiet. She knows, after all (it is not difficult to guess) what the Empire does to its prisoners; she has struggled often enough with her complicity in it to not imagine the worst. Obi-Wan has grown thin, she can see, and there is a randomness to his movements which belies his former grace as he sits at her side; one of his eyes cannot seem to focus, implying a much more recent infliction of pain.

"Hello there," he whispers. "I can't stay long." He is smiling, miraculously, and it sends her heart speeding back years, reminds it just what sort of a sensation rushes through her veins when she contemplates the meaning of joy. 

The guard on my cell is changed every half hour, he says.  _ So, tell me: do I stay, or do I go? And if I go, who do I take with me? _

They talk for twenty minutes before he gets up, stumbles, and goes back to his own particular slice of hell. Padmé, on the other hand, as she stares wide-eyed up at the ceiling, feels as though she has started to be redeemed. 

The next morning, she walks out with her head held high. When she starts asking for things, as the Right Hand's Wife, she almost feels giddy with the power of it. She asks for a retinue, and, eager to please her, Vader grants it; she asks for money, to finally live in style and start doing the Empire's work, and his pleasure is so very nearly intoxicating that it takes her longer than she should have to ask for what was the goal all along: unfettered access to her children, which is also - more hesitantly - given.

(Once, when it is dark and Obi-Wan does not come and she feels her fear creeping up on her again, the only way she is able to beat it back is by telling herself that she has the power to betray him, too. When he appears the next night, able to walk but barely able to breathe, she clings to him and begs for forgiveness, weeping so hard she makes herself sick.)

There is one more part she must play, and it takes her two nights of sleeplessness to prepare for it. She dons her heaviest blacks: her ladies are solemn and quiet in pinning the heavy sleeves and feathers and cloak, a mockery of the happiness she once enjoyed. It is still somewhat a thrill, though one that threatens, rather than soothes, when she strides through the palace late one evening and down into its bowels, surprising officers and shocking stormtroopers into stiff, acquiescing silence.

"I hadn't thought I would see you again," she says, and waits for the Imperial prisoner to respond. 

They have done something to him, and the fear that all they have planned will suddenly unravel is sharp and obliterating as he lifts his head towards her, wipes his mouth free of blood.

"Nor I, Senator," he says, mild as ever. "Lord Vader had not informed me of your presence here."

"With good reason," she retorts. She has thought of what to say a hundred times and more. "I am a creature of the past no longer, as you see."

"I do," Obi-Wan says, and if his sadness is feigned she cannot see it. This other Padmé exists, somewhere, and he can see it, and he pities her her necessity.

"You have no hold on me," she breathes, and she has done enough: when he forces himself to his feet and takes a step towards her she is fully justified in calling shrilly for her guards, in watching them manhandle him backwards, in saying - as she sweeps away, in her majesty - that she wishes for him to be guarded more strictly from now on, so he does no harm to her or to Lord Vader's heirs.

She has done enough, she thinks, as she folds into herself in her private chambers, shaking so hard she cannot drink the sweet tea forced into her hands by one of her servants; she has pushed suspicion as far away from her person as she can, and now all she can do is wait, and hope against hope that Obi-Wan will still be alive when she needs him most.

Her intuition, the only thing that has kept her on her feet, now allows her to sleep - and it takes Obi-Wan a long minute, that night, to wake her, as she struggles up towards the surface of potential that will be her new life, or her imminent death.

She carries Leia; he, limping, carries Luke, and neither of them make a sound. It is Bail himself waiting at the palace's lowest balcony; he cannot even say her name, nor does she expect him to, and they are halfway across Coruscant when she collapses. 

They are in the Outer Rim before she finally allows herself to grieve. It takes her another six months to stop.

_[Part 1 of 2]_

*


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all - it's been a very long time on this one! Life has been busy and writing increasingly hard to eke out, but I hope you enjoy this little tag to the previous chapter. I'm planning to put up the remaining two pieces of this series over the next couple of days.

*

_[Canon Era AU]_

_[Part 2/2]_

_*_

It hadn’t been difficult, in the end, to fall in love with Obi-Wan.

No one had really expected the war to come back to Naboo. For them and for Alderaan alike, the civil war was always something to be supported, but never seen; and in truth, Padmé can't blame them for it. She could never blame her own kin for wanting the security of safety on principle - and with her children hidden deep among Breha's large household, she could never resent Alderaan's public neutrality.

It still astonishes her, though, when she arrives on Naboo in clothes that her former handmaidens would have seen as mere rags, with a fugitive Jedi and half the Rebel fleet in tow to fight the Imperial legions encamped in Theed, how scared her subjects are of what she might do to _them_ , rather than what she could do to the Empire on their behalf.

“Time is our enemy,” Obi-Wan had said, as he stared down at the planet during their approach from orbit, already, as he so often did, looking further into their futures than she could ever fathom. The time since the last invasion, he says, long enough ago that the citizens have forgotten what it is like to live under siege. The time, already so devastating, since this new disaster, so overwhelming, so likely not only to create resistance heroes but to send the vast majority of decent beings fleeing physically and mentally towards any place and any state in which they think themselves safe and alone.

The diminishing time the two of them have before they are worn too ragged to be of any use.

Now, two weeks into a battle during which, every day, she finds herself blinking in dumbfounded silence at the rubble of a building she can conjure out of the air in her mind, perfect and whole and its colors illuminated by sunlight, she feels them both cracking at their cores.

Padmé is not surprised for herself. She had recognized the likelihood that she would crumple under the weight of her world from the moment that she’d left Luke and Leia aboard the flagship, kissing their foreheads while they slept and creeping away relieved, rather than ashamed, that she didn’t wait for them to wake before she said goodbye. She sees them in her sleep, and wakes up shuddering, turning into whatever comfort is closest.

Most often, that comfort is Obi-Wan, when he is only half-awake himself, and she can sense that the shades he carries are familiar to her, too. He musters up a smile, and she marvels at his bravery, and takes it up as her rallying call.

In the moments where she has any self-awareness left – the ones when she is not wholly given over to her cause – she thinks that she is glad that Kenobi does not blaze for her.

_He_ did. He would have stormed at her side, always taking three steps to her one, all-powerful, all-consumed by and confident in the supposed knowledge that his anger would save her. That he was right, and that, by simple logic, anything or anyone else could not be. That he was the only one for her, as though the universe had but one key, and one answer to any one question.

She was a politician, once, and knows that the universe could never be so simple. Not that she didn’t believe in truth – she still does, even standing in the tattered remnants of what she had taken for granted. But she believes in second chances, and she believes in hope, and she believes in the Jedi (the man) who walks at her side now. The man who carries water within him, and believes in bringing it back to parched worlds.

The man whom she wants to be a father to her children, she realizes one evening, and the thought catches in her chest.

The rivers have stopped flowing on Naboo. The waterfalls, choked off upstream by rubble and collapsed masonry, have stopped falling. It is when they are standing below one of them, looking up into the red sunset and planning how they will transport their troops up to higher ground, that she turns to him and says that he is the only thing she has left, in this moment, and that she is glad of it.

His responding smile is tight and sad, his eyes wary. “Is that enough?”

“It is everything,” she says, and reaches sideways to slide her dust-dry palm into his.

*


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A _[Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsnhHvlHDOw)_ AU! If you haven't seen this show, I HIGHLY recommend it. :-)

*

Padmé genuinely can’t figure out how she prefers Detective Inspector Kenobi, which is a most delicious problem.

She’d been impressed with him since the start, naturally – given the air of sometimes-testy authority he brought with him into every room, it occasionally startles her that it took her so long to give him the respect he deserved. But then again, his stunningly attractive constable had done rather a good job of blunting her interest in most other things in his vicinity.

(“Stop making eyes at my officers,” he’d say every so often, at first stern, then more reluctantly more exasperated as he realized how very outmatched he was. “Ensnaring Skywalker is practically cradle-snatching.”

“I can’t help it if my interest is enthusiastically reciprocated, Ben,” she’d pout, and he’d cough and harrumph and secretly smile at the both of them.)

She likes him when he’s kind to Sabé, just the sort of distant gentleman he should be with a girl under Padmé’s wing, and sneakily likes him even more when he approves of Skywalker’s transference of affection and real, enduring love to a target far more deserving and understanding of it than Padmé herself. She likes him when she first meets his ex-wife, and despite both of their defenses sees that Satine is a firecracker of a woman, uncompromising and wholehearted, and understands now his faint embarrassment when the two of them are in the same room, as though ashamed of his own taste.

She likes him, with melancholy, when he mentions the War, and his part in it. It doesn’t happen often, and they discover it of each other piecemeal. She appreciates his gravitas over it, the quiet solicitude frequently necessary when some dark shadow of it crosses over their work. When he first overhears that she worked in a field ambulance, she catches the signs of his distress: the irrevocable tightening of his jaw, the deepening of his eyes. Later that evening, she sees him glance at her hands, and wonders if he is thinking of them dripping with blood. Even later than that, she realizes that yes – of course he was. More than that, however, she believes with everything she knows that he was thinking of how he would wipe them clean.

She appreciates him _very_ much when he rides in as some approximation of a knight-errant, despite being comfortable in his place one step (or two, or three) behind her, with his police-issue pistol outstretched and some groaning thug in the corridor beyond ruing the day he’d ever gone up against the law, and how he fetches up and just shakes his head at her, slightly askew, one lock of copper hair dangling over his forehead.

“Miss Amidala,” he’ll say, regaining his breath and his composure. “Everything under control?”

“Perfectly, Ben,” she’ll grin, and catch her own pulse.

In the end, she prefers him best in the evenings – at the end of a long day and a longer case, when Melbourne has grown dark and quiet and she’s wearing silk and pearls, and there is a firm rap at the front door. With Sabé sewing and soft over cocoa in the kitchen, it’s Padmé who opens the door and invites him in; she’s alone with him in the sitting room, with candles lit and brandy warm in her belly and thinking that she would rather spend an evening with him and a chess set than anything else in the world.

“I’ve brought you something,” he says, and pulls a little bag out of his pocket; he is immaculate and controlled, now, as he is on every one of these evenings, but Padmé is no longer capable of forgetting how he can otherwise look. “We’re doing everything we can to find the owner, of course, but when materiel is smuggled it’s not always easy to find their source. I thought this would be safest with you.”

He puts the emerald carefully into her palm: it is the priceless trophy of this week’s work, salvaged from a warehouse and gang they have rolled up at the docks, and it refracts and gleams even in the low light of her fireplace, breathtaking.

“Leaving police evidence with a private citizen, Inspector?” she teases, gently, and coaxes out of him just the sort of sideways smile that makes him part and parcel of her house. “How unlike you.”

“Yes, well,” he demurs, and sits familiarly on her divan, reaching out to take the glass she has prepared for him, “I rather think any would-be thief would have a harder time breaking in here than at the station.”

“And besides,” he says – significantly and deep-voiced – as he’s leaving, very late and refreshingly uncaring of what that might mean for the gossip about them around town, “it suits you.”

Padmé stays awake deep into the night, thinking of precisely what setting she would have the stone put into; how long its chain, just where it would nestle at the hollow of her throat, or further down.

She wouldn’t want to disappoint the Inspector, after all.

*


	12. Chapter 12

*

It has been a challenge, since the start, to figure out just how time works on Tatooine.

Oh, he could calculate it - that was by far the easiest challenge. He could time it off in cycles, hours and seconds: he could make sure his dingy clock, scavenged from ship parts sold in Mos Eisley, had enough power fed into it from the evaporator systems to make sure it kept a rigorous, atomic accuracy. He could receive messages, infrequently, that were date-stamped, and recognize that this thing called time had passed since the last one, and remember that there were other things associated with this passage: numbers climbing higher, age ascending, days left running out.

But what it felt like - that, he found it hard to grasp. Numbers, after all, could not convey nor capture what the sun looked like at dusk, night after night after long, long weary night. He couldn't remember, after all that had happened, the exact figures of axial tilt and length of seasons - if there were any in this desolate place - that would tell him how fast the constellations above his head were meant to be moving across his field of vision, and so he watched them dance and did not know if they were in a hurry, or whether they lagged behind.

A broken evaporator: ah, it is that part that needs repair, and it was new when he came, and its life expectancy is six months. The migration of the Tuskens, which he has heard takes place once every two years: he has seen three of them, now, three long days when he stands in his doorway and watches the distant, silent procession of silhouettes across the dunes. He has no mirror, but he can look at his hands: at how they have darkened in the sun, and remember, vaguely, that perhaps he was not supposed to allow this to happen.

But if he had not - ?

In a world in which nothing changes, the difficulty becomes that any newness feels cataclysmic.

He first hears her voice after - he thinks - seven years have passed, and the little shape that is Luke (seen from a distance, so he cannot measure the child exactly, and this blurs his remembrance even further) has started to fly his dangerous, wobbling way through local canyons. He has heard other voices before, each bringing with them other timelines, other lifetimes he cannot reconcile - but _her_ he had never, in his wildest dreams (and he has had many) expected to hear again.

It is not even her voice, at first, but the voices of many. Of women, distant and unaware of him. Handmaidens, he thinks: the protective cluster of them, each circling in and out of each other's lives and faces and hearts. He wakes, and the voices stop, and he is glad to have dreamt of them, for a moment of relief.

She does not speak in words. He doubts she ever will, or that, given the complexities of the Force and its allowances, she ever could. But he can translate her, nonetheless: when he is overcome, suddenly, his breath catching in his lungs, by feelings which can only be hers, it is easy to let himself understand what it is she means.

 _My son_ , she says, and he walks out into the desert barefoot, prickling with dread and excitement, and stands on a clifftop, watching with astonished eyes as the little speeder swoops and banks.

 _My daughter_ , she says, and he does his best: he risks a brief HoloNet connection, finds his way to the photographs of the Queen and Senator of Alderaan and their child, and finds himself weeping.

 _Anakin_ , she says, and he dares not. He meditates for hours until he can hear her no more, and she is silent for what feels like months (but he is never sure). He is reprimanded for it, by himself and by the Force. He feels as though it has grown thin around him, like the planet is being slowly stripped of its atmosphere, and at any moment it could turn brittle and shatter away into irreparable shards.

 _You_ , she says, in the dead of night, and he does not know what to answer. There are other ghosts which speak to him: they present argument and counterargument and advice and orders, and none of them seem right - not for her.

 _You?_ she asks. Gently. If Tatooine has a summer, it seems as though it is happening now, as though the nights are left warm by the heat radiating from the sands.

He falls asleep, and dreams of her - perfect in body, unblemished, untouched by sorrow as surely as she was created by it. She is sitting in a distant grassland, with the desert encroaching all around, and he is by her side.

 _Stay,_ he asks. He is perilously close to begging.

When he wakes, he finds himself quite thoroughly convinced that he has imagined every moment of it: that in a way, she never left, and what he has been hearing has been his own creation. He has very little idea whether the realization of this is supposed to be any comfort. It helps him decide something, at least: that when he forms her in his own image, he will have her speak.

He sees mirages, sometimes, when he is making his lonely way through the desert. There are oases on his horizons, promising deep, near-black water: trees with roots so deep that they will never die.

She lives there, he thinks, one day, with perfect clarity. She is in one of those places, and he only has to find it.

However much time it takes.

*

**FIN**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with this sad little coda, the series is finally done! Thank you so much for reading and for your comments :-)


End file.
